Advanced Formats

The ajax commands in the main API can take arbitrary maps as request and response formats. Indeed, ajax-request requires that you do this rather than use keywords as formats. This file documents the behaviour.

A request format (given by :format) has two keys:

• :content-type The content type to send to the server
• :write A function taking :params and returning a string

A response format (given by :response-format) is a bit more complex:

• :description A description of the format, for use in error messages.
• :read A function that takes the underlying goog.net.XhrIo and converts it to a response. Exceptions thrown by this will be caught.
• :content-type The content type to put in the Accept header.
• :type Optional. One of :blob, :document, :json (which uses the browser's JSON decoding to a JS object), :text (same as blank), :arraybuffer. Set :read to -body if you want to use this.

Standard Formats

There are functions that return request and response formats. Most of these functions don't take parameters. These correspond to the keywords mentioned in the main documentation.

Keyword	Request	Response
:transit	transit-request-format	transit-response-format
:json	json-request-format	json-response-format
:url	url-request-format
:ring		ring-response-format
:raw		raw-response-format
:text	text-request-format	text-response-format
:detect		detect-response-format

text-response-format and raw-response-format are identical in ClojureScript, but raw-response-format returns the byte stream in Clojure, while text-response-format returns a string. text-request-format is a pass-through in ClojureScript, but converts a string to a byte stream in Clojure (which is what you want).

Transit parameters

transit-request-format takes options

• :writer explicit Transit writer. If not supplied one will be created using the other options.
• :type specifies transit format: json, json-verbose or msgpack. The default is json for ClojureScript and msgpack for Clojure.
• :handlers Custom handlers passed through to Transit.

transit-response-format takes options

• :reader (CLJS only) explicit Transit reader. If not supplied one will be created using the other options.
• :handlers Custom handlers passed through to Transit.

The content-type of the response is used to determine the Transit type (json or msgpack).

JSON parameters

json-response-format takes an options map with three possible options

• :prefix is a string that needs to be stripped off the front of the response before parsing it as JSON, which is useful for dealing with external APIs that put things like while(1); in front. (And if you're using cljs-ajax with GET, learn about cross-site scripting and then employ this feature in your own code.) Defaults to nil.
• :keywords?, which if true returns the keys as keywords and if false or unprovided returns them as strings.
• :raw, if true, returns a JS object rather than a CLJS object.

URL parameters

url-request-format takes one parameter: vec-strategy.

• :java will render {:a [1 2]} as a=1&a=2. This works with yada, ASP and Jetty (ring). It also matches the behaviour of superagent.
• :rails will render {:a [1 2]} as a[]=1&a[]=2. This is also the correct setting for working with PHP and matches the behaviour of jQuery.
• :indexed will render {:a [1 2]} as a[0]=1&a[1]=2. This is mostly kept for backwards compatibility and shouldn't be used in new code.

Ring parameters

ring-response-format takes one parameter: format. This can be any valid response format map as described above. If a format is not specified then raw-response-format will be used. (This is also what happens if you use the :ring keyword.)

Detect parameters

detect-response-format has one parameter: :response-format, which is a list of pairs. The first item in the pair is a substring that starts the content type. The second item is the response format function to call. It will be passed the options in. So, you can, for instance, have :raw set to true and content detection available at the same time. If you use the zero-arity version, :response-format is set to default-formats.

EDN

EDN is deprecated, but the functions edn-request-format and edn-response-format are available in the ajax.edn namespace.

Google Closure JSON

Earlier versions used Google Closure's implementation of JSON. This was the correct choice at the time since native implementations were pretty inconsistent. These days, it's more likely that you'll want to be using the browser native JSON implementation which is vastly faster and handles dates better, but if you still need the old behaviour you can get it by using goog-json-request-format and goog-json-response-format in the ajax.goog-json namespace. They support the same options as the standard JSON implementation and share most of the internal code.

Non-standard formats

To get the raw XhrIo object back:

{:read identity :description "raw"}

Obviously, this will do something surprisingly different if you're running this code in Java.